Rod Rosenstein just blew a huge hole in the Democrats’ “obstruction of justice” narrative, dismantling their foremost argument against President Donald Trump.
It’s been two months since special counsel Robert Mueller submitted his report to Attorney General William Barr. Mueller concluded—after almost two years of an investigation that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars—that there was no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, and declined to come to a conclusion about whether there was any obstruction of justice. A short time later, Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced their joint conclusion that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to conclude that the president in any way obstructed justice as a matter of fact and law.
For many Democratic members of Congress, the report and the conclusions by Barr and Rosenstein were simply too much to bear. How could their white knight—Mueller—and his team of Clinton supporters have failed to find the collusion and obstruction that was so clear to liberal partisans?
Rather than moving on and focusing on public policy initiatives, Democratic committee chairs in the House of Representatives have remained fixated on the Mueller report, threatening to hold the attorney general in contempt of Congress if he doesn’t give them an unredacted version of the report—perhaps hoping to find in the redactions that it was all a misunderstanding and that Mueller really did find collusion and obstruction.
One Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee even convinced her colleagues to hold a public reading of the Mueller report, perhaps with the hope that reviewing the politically charged “facts” the Mueller team put in the report would provide some catharsis.
While House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and his fellow diehards still hang on to the collusion myth, others are now taking Mueller’s irresponsible equivocation on obstruction of justice as license to make their own factual and legal findings—naturally, they’ve concluded that the president simply must have obstructed justice in some way.
The Comey firing is a curious choice for the Democrats to use as their leading evidence to support their obstruction claim. Comey was, for a time, the Democratic Party’s villain after his announcement concerning Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal, in which he declined to pursue charges against Clinton, but still detailed her extensive wrongdoing. After Trump’s election victory, that press briefing by Comey provided one of the countless excuses offered by Democrats for Clinton’s shocking loss at the polls.
However, once it was learned that Comey and his fellow travelers at the Justice Department were actually working behind the scenes on a plan to defeat candidate Donald Trump or oust him from office once he was elected, Comey found redemption and was welcomed into the anti-Trump camp. He burnished his “#resistance” credentials on his recent tour to promote his book and redeem himself publicly, taking every opportunity to attack the president.
But constitutional and statutory provisions, or facts, for that matter, have been no obstacle to the anti-Trump camp. They are determined to succeed by any means necessary in their quest to destroy Trump’s presidency, no matter what the collateral damage to our system of laws.
Those were serious anti-Trump credentials, and the Democrats hoped that once out of office, Rosenstein would wholeheartedly support their absurd notion that the president obstructed justice when he directed Rosenstein to fire Comey.
Those hopes have been dashed.
Rosenstein has made it crystal clear that there is no factual or legal merit to any claim that the president obstructed justice in connection with the firing of Comey. For Nadler and company, an apology—and maybe even a thank-you note to the president for firing Comey in the first place—would be appropriate.
